Hallie's Comet: The Federal Theatre
By Robert Brustein
[This
essay was originally written as the forward to Voices from the
Federal Theatre, ed. Bonnie Nelson Schwartz (copyright U of Wisc.
P, 2003) and linked with the Fall 2003 PBS special Who Killed the
Federal Theatre? An Investigation, hosted by Judd Hirsch and coproduced
by Schwartz with the Educational Film Center.]
The glorious, totally improbable, and ultimately ill-fated adventure
known as the Federal Theatre Project lasted from 1935 to 1939.
It was killed by an act of Congress in an atmosphere
of Redbaiting and political hysteria. Yet, in four short years this
visionary organization not only created a host of successful Federal
Theatre productions, but it helped to revolutionize our notions of the
geography and purpose of the American stage.
Conceived in the middle of the Great Depression
as a plan to find jobs for an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 out-of-work
actors, directors, playwrights, designers, and stagehands, the Federal
Theatre at its height eventually employed 13,000 theatre artists in
thirty-one states. The relief agency known as the Works Project Administration
(WPA), under the enlightened leadership of FDR's deputy Harry Hopkins,
had come to realize that among the more than one-third of the nation
that were ill-fed, ill-clad, and ill-housed were a number of indigent
artists. Hopkins thereupon proceeded to organize a series of Arts Projects,
including one for the theatre, and began looking around for an appropriate
leader.
Hopkins found his ideal National Director in
Hallie Flanagan Davis, a forty-five year old Professor of Drama at Vassar,
who possessed boundless energy, irrepressible optimism, untiring zeal,
and no administrative experience whatsoever. Hopkins knew instinctively
that the project had to be run by a non-commercial theatre person and
Hallie had caught his eye through the experimental work she had been
doing at Vassar. He was soon to learn that she was not only an extraordinary
theatre visionary, but an individual of unusual character, integrity
and drive--qualities that, in combination, made her one of the greatest
leaders in the history of American theatre.
Rather than feeling her way into her new job,
Hallie began with very clear ideas about what was expected of a Federal
Theatre. She was convinced that such a project, though conceived as
a source of economic relief, was also obliged to establish and maintain
high artistic standards. A subsidized Federal Theatre would have to
be an alternative to the commercial stage, not a competitor with it,
keeping ticket prices within the reach of all. It would also need to
be a decentralized theatre--indeed, the seed of a national theatre movement--creating
productions not just in New York but in every major city and region
of the country. And (perhaps her most controversial idea) its mission
would be to produce plays that were not mere entertainments but artworks
relevant to the social and political problems of the day. Each of these
decisions was destined to extend the boundaries of the American stage
and each was destined to land the Federal Theatre in a lot of hot water.
The attempt to combine relief and art, for example,
was full of potential conflict, particularly because of the differing
goals of social work and artistic achievement. Was the Federal Theatre
to be a source of great plays and productions or rather an agency designed
to better the lives of the unemployed? How could the Federal Theatre
pursue the goals of excellence when the best American theatre artists
were not among the unemployed, indeed when Broadway producers sometimes
wanted the same artists, at substantially higher wages, for their commercial
shows?
Many of the same producers were criticizing the
Federal Theatre's subsidized ticket prices (sometimes as low as 25 cents)
as unfair competition for the higher-priced Broadway stage. But this
was only one of Hallie's headaches. Her effort to decentralize the Federal
Theatre, a highly successful move when measured by the number of new
theatres being formed around the country in a very brief time, did not
always produce work of the highest professional quality. Moreover, the
effort sometimes stimulated narrow regional prejudices and chauvinisms.
Most dangerous of all, the social and political tub-thumping of the
Federal Theatre made it consistently vulnerable to government censorship.
Harry Hopkins had promised Hallie a theatre that
was "free, adult, uncensored." Too often, he was unable to keep that
pledge. This should not surprise us. There are few patrons of the arts,
least of all the government, who have been able to refrain from meddling
in the conduct of the artists they support, especially when their work
has a high political profile. And there is no question that Federal
Theatre artists, with Hallie's blessings, did not hesitate to embroil
her in controversy.
Hallie was never opposed to using the theatre
for propaganda purposes, if that meant exposing political corruption
or unjust social conditions. But although she was often accused of promoting
Communism, and even of being a Communist herself, she never consciously
allowed the Federal theatre to be used for the purpose of endorsing
political parties or advancing political aims. Indeed, she did not hesitate
to cancel plays that seemed to her overtly partisan. As she wrote in
a note chastizing one of her more radical producers, "I will not have
the Federal Theatre used politically. I will not have it used to further
the ends of the Democratic party, the Republican party, or the Communist
party."
The occasion was a production called Injunction
Granted, a play about duped workers and rapacious capitalists that
Hallie called "bad journalism and hysterical theatre" because it used
government funds "as a party tool." It may have been disingenuous of
her to believe that her goal of "a relevant theatre with regional roots,"
devoted to dramatizing social problems like homelessness and electrical
power, would not be exploited for narrow political purposes. It may
have been even more naive to assume that the agency that subsidized
these productions would refrain from suppressing or censoring them if
they threatened government interests.
The first government collision arose over a play
called Ethiopa when the WPA banned the appearance on stage
of such heads of state as Benito Mussolini and Haile Selassie (Robert
Schnitzer's Delaware production of Julius Caesar was also castigated
for insulting Il Duce). This move led to the resignation of Elmer Rice
as director of the New York Project. There would be even more consternation
when Federal Theatre productions criticized or ridiculed American political
figures, an irresistible temptation considering the level of mind in
Congress at the time.
Hallie began by dividing her empire into five
large units: 1) the Living Newspaper, 2) popular price theatre, with
Yiddish, Spanish, and other ethnic companies, 3) experimental theatre,
4) Negro theatre, under the directorship of John Houseman and Rose McClendon,
and 5) tryout theatre. Hallie's Living Newspapers were always destined
to be the most inflammatory things she produced. An effort to dramatize
the news ("something like the March of Time in the movies,"
Harry Hopkins explained to a belligerent Congressman), the Living Newspaper
was a spinoff of the epic techniques of Brecht and Piscator. Using confrontational
devices and polemical themes, it was meant to be an antidote to a commercial
theatre that, in Hallie's words, "continues to tell in polite whispers
its tales of small triangular love stories in small rectangular settings."
The Living Newspaper settings, as designed by scenic artists like Howard
Bay and Mordecai Gorelik, making good use of George Izenour's new remote-control
switchboard, were imaginative and various. They substituted light and
projections for the "cumbersome scenery" that Hallie and other theatre
visionaries were now finding obsolete, mainly because "The cinema,"
as she added prophetically, "had beaten realism at its own game."
More importantly, the stories told in these openly
propagandistic pieces concerned the big issues of the time. In the first
of the Living Theatre successes, Triple A Plowed Under, the
Federal Theatre enjoined the farmer and the consumer to unite for higher
wages and healthier food. It ran for eighty-five performances in New
York and was later produced in Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and
Milwaukee (though not in Texas where a WPA administrator exhorted Hallie
to do "old plays" that didn't evoke bad criticism). That Texan bureaucrat
might have had the same complaint about Power, a call for public
ownership of utilities, and Spirochete, a history of syphillis
climaxing with a call for mandatory blood tests, and (unquestionably
the Federal Theatre's greatest success) One Third of a Nation,
which exposed the existence of poor housing conditions in the nation's
largest cities.
The audience's appetite for "old plays," however,
would seem to have been satisfied by the Federal Theatre unit under
the direction of John Houseman and Orson Welles. But even classical
production was not to be free of controversy. These early efforts to
deconstruct classics by making them more "relevant" to the contemporary
world (a process later employed by such modern directors as Andrei Serban,
Peter Brook, and Peter Sellars), successful as some of them were, still
managed to raise hackles. Houseman had hired Welles, at the tender age
of twenty, to direct Macbeth with his Negro unit. Setting the
play in Haiti, Welles turned the witches into voodoo witch-doctors and
treated the central character as if he were "Emperor Jones gone beautifully
mad," thereby creating a triumph that played New York and toured the
country to great acclaim. The success of this Voodoo Macbeth
encouraged Negro units throughout the country to stage black versions
of other European classics such as The Swing Mikado and Lysistrata,
though the latter was eventually shut down by the WPA for being too
"risqué."
Following Macbeth, which was staged
at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, Houseman and Welles took over the
Maxine Elliot Theatre on Broadway to produce two more scintillating
versions of classic plays: Horse Eats Hat, a wild adaptation
of a 19th-Century Labiche farce featuring the young Joseph Cotten, and
Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, directed by and starring
Welles in the title role (his first leading part in New York).
Faustus was by all accounts a mesmerizing
retinterpretation of a great classical play, with Jack Carter (the black
actor who played Macbeth) turning Mephistopheles into a dignified, bemused
portrait of evil, and with Welles indulging his weakness for heavy makeup
along with his lifelong passion for magic in the way he staged the episode
involving the Seven Deadly Sins. The Federal Theatre was now on a roll.
Critics were calling it the "greatest producer of hits" in New York.
The best dramatists of the day, such as Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill,
were letting the project do their plays for a royalty of $50 a week
or less, delighted to get produced in regions that would normally never
be exposed to their work. Similarly, novelists like Sinclair Lewis were
only too happy to accept Hallie's invitation to adapt their novels into
plays. Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, about the coming of fascism
to America, though a poor piece of dramatic writing, had twenty-two
productions opening simultaneously in eighteen cities, and played to
nearly 500,000 people. Inevitably, the play was interpreted as campaign
propaganda for the New Deal.
Despite its accumulating successes, however,
the Federal Theatre suffered a grievous loss in authority and personnel
when Marc Blitzstein's Brechtian satire The Cradle Will Rock
was cancelled by the WPA administration, on the eve of its opening,
under the pretext of budget cutting. The story of the opera's clandestine
resurrection is now too well known to require extensive retelling (that
episode would be the centerpiece of Tim Robbins' 1999 film, also called
The Cradle Will Rock, which starred Cherry Jones as Hallie
Flanagan). Suffice it to say, Welles and Houseman walked their opening-night
audience twenty blocks uptown from the Maxine Elliot to the empty Venice
Theatre; Blitzstein played the entire score from his piano; and the
actors, cleverly skirting a union injunction, sang their parts from
the house, all to thunderous applause.
But it was a Pyrrhic victory for the Federal
Theatre. Welles and Houseman left the project soon after to form their
own Mercury Theatre, where they produced a groundbreaking Julius
Caesar in black shirts and a mesmerizing Heartbreak House
that found the twenty-two year old Orson Welles once again applying
excessive makeup to play the octogenerian Captain Shotover. But although
Hallie professed to be happy whenever her artists found work in the
commercial theatre, the Houseman-Welles defection left her without her
two most dynamic figures and valuable assets.
She was also losing her greatest supporter in
the Roosevelt Administration, Harry Hopkins who, ill with cancer, was
starting to let less informed assistants make his decisions for him.
(The quality of those decisions can be assessed by the opinion of one
of them, a California bureaucrat, who called a good theatre project
"anything that keeps out of the papers"). In his second term, Roosevelt
had cut government spending in order to avoid inflation and give business
a leg up and, as usual, the first area to suffer was the arts.
Around this time, Hallie remained resolutely
focused on her mandate to create a truly national theatre, making tireless
tours of the country in an effort to ensure that all the regional units
were running well and maintaining high standards. Wherever she went,
she encountered gratitude from artists and audiences alike, but also
hostility from some of the press and abuse from some of the politicians.
There was the usual criticism growing in Congress that too much money
was being spent in New York by Bolshevik sympathizers. The Washington
Post called for an end of the Federal Theatre and its "frilly artistic
projects." Hearst's San Francisco Examiner carried a headline
demanding "Federal Theatre Communist Trend Must Be Eradicated." One
Congressional investigator was appalled that, in some Federal Theatre
shows, blacks and whites shared the same stage and even "danced together."
Even the titles of harmless Federal Theatre stock farces--The Bishop
Misbehaves, Up In Mabel's Room, Lend Me Your Husband--were being
denounced as lewd and salacious by Congressmen who never bothered to
see the plays.
It must be admitted that the Workers Alliance,
a socialist organization said to be a nursery for the Communist party,
was recruiting a lot of Federal Theatre employees. And it is also true
that some of the project's later work, notably the children's play Revolt
of the Beavers, was sufficiently slanted to provoke the Times's
Brooks Atkinson into saying it was Karl Marx disguised as Mother Goose
and the Saturday Evening Post into charging the Federal Theatre
with teaching poor children to murder rich ones (actually, kids of all
income brackets loved the show as a story of good guys versus bad guys).
Hallie often replied, with a zealousness that knew no fear, that only
a free people could create a Federal Theatre, that it was a democratic
answer both to communism and fascism. But no one seemed to be listening.
The Federal Theatre, lacking any genuine grassroots support, was being
convicted without defense in the court of public opinion.
Eventually, the House Un-American Activities
Committee under the chairmanship of the notorious Martin Dies of Texas,
saw the political controversy engulfing the Federal Theatre as an excellent
opportunity to attack the Roosevelt administration. Dies's fellow committeeman
from New Jersey, J. Parnell Thomas--both of them would soon turn their
attention in the direction of "Reds" in Hollywood--identified the Federal
Theatre not just as a "link in the vast and unparallelled New Deal propaganda
machine," but as an arm of the Communist Party. In the words of Jane
De Hart Matthews (The Federal Theatre, 1935-39), "Hereafter,
Hallie Flanagan would find her time and attention devoted increasingly
to defense of the Federal Theatre, rather than to its expansion."
Hallie's preoccupation with defending the reputation
of her enterprise would also occupy the attention of the best commentators
on the subject--not only Ms. De Hart but, as she admitted in her poignant
and powerful memoir Arena, Hallie herself. As a drama with
its own heroes and villains, this conflict between strongarm politics
and defenseless art was a natural for press attention, but its outcome
was foreordained. Not only would the Democratic administration fail
to put through its projected plan for a new governmental Department
of Art, providing subsidized theatrical, musical, and art activities
in twenty-five to one hundred cities. It would be enjoined from supporting
any art at all, most especially the art of the theatre.
What is deeply frustrating about this encounter
is that for many months the eloquent Hallie Flanagan was prevented by
the WPA administration from releasing any statements to the press in
her own defense. She had to remain silent not only in the face of criticism
of her own politics but of the Federal Theatre's artistic achievements.
Witness after witness testified to how the Federal Theatre was dominated
by Communists and fellow travellers, after which Representative Clifton
Woodrum of Virginia informed the House that "[The Federal Theatre] has
produced nothing of merit as far as national productions are concerned,"
adding with smug pride, "We are going out of the theatre business."
Finally, Hallie was allowed to submit a brief
before the Dies Committee, after a large number of unfriendly witnesses
had sufficiently tarnished the reputation of her endeavor. The brief
was never read or published, but some of it was covered in her testimony.
She began by defending the patriotism of her project ("Since August
29, 1935, I have been...combatting Un-American activity") and herself
against charges that, because she had once visited Russia and written
favorably about Russian theatre, she was a Red. It is disheartening
to find this dignified human being forced to say "that I am not and
never have been a Communist; that I am a registered Democrat...that
I had planned and directed Federal Theatre from the first as an American
enterprise." Words of a similar nature would echo and re-echo throughout
Congressional chambers for many years to come.
Hallie was willing to concede that many of her
productions were expressions of propaganda, but insisted that propaganda
was a form of education for democracy, rather than a tool for advancing
Communist doctrine. In a moment that summed up the nature of this investigation,
she was asked by Representative Joseph Starnes about an ominous figure
named Christopher Marlowe. "You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he
a Communist?" "Put in the record," Hallie replied, "that he was the
greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare." It was a blunder on
a level with the Committee charge some years later that the eight-year-old
Shirley Temple was a Communist for dancing with Bill Robinson, and it
was a blunder that would end up in Starnes' obituary, though unfortunately
not on his tombstone.
But Hallie could make no impact on a Committee
determined to extinguish the Federal Theatre from the face of the earth.
With Chairman Dies raising his gavel to end the hearings for lunch,
Hallie asked to be allowed to make a final statement. Dies said he would
consider it, but she never got her chance to be heard again, nor was
her testimony ever distributed. "We don't want you back," declared Congressman
Thomas, "You're a tough customer and we're all worn out."
As a direct result of these hearings, the House
eventually passed, by a vote of 373 to 21, the Relief Bill for 1939-40
calling for sweeping changes in the WPA program, including drastic cuts
in arts funding and the imposition of loyalty oaths designed to get
rid of radicals. It also called for an end to the Federal Theatre. Hallie
learned about this development from a newspaper someone handed her,
shocked that Congress had decided on what she called "outright execution
rather than slow strangulation." There would be rallies on behalf of
the Federal Theatre. Critics would speak of its great achievements.
Orson Welles would offer to debate hostile politicians on radio. Telegrams
would pour in from far and wide. And the Senate, charmed by Tallulah
Bankhead, daughter of one of its members, would briefly consider keeping
the Federal Theatre alive for a few more years. But the effort failed
because the Senate was reluctant to put other artists out of work in
order to save funds for the theatre, and, for the same reason, Roosevelt
sadly signed the bill.
Despite Hallie's brave cries of "Do not give
up," and the thunderous support of the entire theatre industry and thousands
of supporters, all efforts to save the Federal Theatre proved of no
avail. This first attempt in history to subsidize serious Ameridan theatre
with federal funds was treated by Congress with the same hostility,
maliciousness, and fear that were later to surround the National Endowment
for the Arts, and a great Idea, one that brought fine theatre to a new
audience of millions of Americans, fell victim to narrow and bigoted
minds. "Thus Federal Theatre ended as it began," wrote Hallie in Arena,
"with fearless presentation of problems touching American life. If this
first government theatre in our country had been less alive it might
have lived longer. But I do not believe anyone who worked on it regrets
that it stood from first to last against reaction, against prejudice,
against racial, religious, and political intolerance. It strove for
a more dramatic statement and a better understanding of the great forces
of our life today; it fought for a free theatre as one of the many expressions
of a civilized, informed, and vigorous life."
Hallie not only lost her job; she lost her second
husband, Philip H. Davis, soon after the demise of the Federal Theatre.
She went back to academic life in 1941, accepting a position at Smith
College as Dean and as Professor of Drama. It was there that I first
met her, as a student at Amherst when one of my Smith girlfriends was
playing in a Living Newspaper piece called E=MC Square about
the splitting of the atom. Four years later, she developed the illness
that seems to afflict so many theatre artists, Parkinson's disease,
and retired to her old haunts in Poughkeepsie near Vassar, where she
died in 1969 at the age of seventy-nine.
The Voices of the Federal Theatre, some of them
growing a little hoarse and parched with age, all testify to the vigor,
the energy, the controversy, and the fearlessness that characterized
this project and its leader. Reflecting the ephemeral nature of the
theatre itself, nothing remains of the productions except for some faded
photographs and some yellowing scripts. But just as other Federal arts
projects produced such giants as John Cheever, Ralph Ellison and Richard
Wright in the Writers program, and Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning,
Philip Guston, and Jack Levine in the Art project, the Theatre program
provided a home for some of the most brilliant actors, directors, designers,
and dancers of the period (only the Group Theatre can boast as many
gifted alumni): Orson Welles and John Houseman, Norman Lloyd, Arthur
Kennedy, Katherine Dunham, Helen Tamiris, Jack Carter, Canada Lee, Ian
Keith, Joseph Cotten, Burt Lancaster, Sidney Lumet, E.G. Marshall, Alvin
Childress, Will Geer, Paula Lawrence, John Randolph, Jules Dassin, Jose
Limon--the list is endless. And this, in the face of the fact that the
Federal Theatre was mandated to hire not reigning stars but primarily
the unemployed.
But let the last words be those of the great
woman who saw this project through those four exhilarating, demoralizing,
incomparable years: "The President of the United States in writing to
me of his regret at the closing of the Federal Theatre referred to it
as a pioneering job. This it was, gutsy, lusty, bad and good, sad and
funny, superbly worth more wit, wisdom and imagination than we could
give it. Its significance lies in pointing to the future. The ten thousand
anonymous men and women--the et ceteras and the and-so-forths who did
the work, the nobodies who were everybody, the somebodies who believed
it--their dreams and deeds were not the end. They were the beginning
of a people's theatre in a country whose greatest plays are still to
come."
Those of us in the serious American theatre have
built on the back of this brave enterprise, and in the shadow of the
unconquerable figure who led it. May her spirit rest, unperturbed and
proud.